Kitchen Sink School
A group of British Social Realist painters active in the 1950s who specialized in drab working-class subjects, notably interior scenes and still-lifes of domestic clutter and debris; the term, not intended as a compliment, was coined by the critic David Sylvester in an article in the December 1954 issue of the journal Encounter. The main artists covered by the term were John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, and Jack Smith, who were supported by Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery in London.
In 1956 they exhibited together at the Venice Biennale. By their choice of dour and sordid themes and their harsh aggressive style they were seen to express the same kind of dissatisfaction with the values of post-war British society as the ‘Angry Young Men’ in literature (writers such as John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger was first produced in 1956, were sometimes referred to as ‘kitchen sink dramatists’).
Their principal critical supporter was the Marxist John Berger, although not all the painters had a strong political motivation. In the context of the Cold War, opponents of the school's brand of Social Realism were inclined to associate it with the Socialist Realism imposed as an artistic dogma in the Eastern bloc. From the late 1950s the painters of the Kitchen Sink School developed in different ways, Bratby, for example, emphasizing his Expressionist handling, and Smith eventually turning to abstraction, for which he was dismissed by the Beaux Arts Gallery. Berger denounced his former protégés.
The bad feelings aroused by the controversy over the painters' work, and especially its politicized interpretation, ran high for many years afterwards. In the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, in 1984 entitled ‘The Forgotten Fifties’, which included the Kitchen Sink painters, the curator, Julian Spalding, commented that the research for the exhibition had meant ‘opening wounds’.
Jack Smith was initially particularly critical of the proposed exhibition, although he eventually contributed a statement of his own point of view on the subject to the catalogue, in which he denied that there had been any political agenda behind his work.
Peter Coker (1926–2004), a painter noted for thickly painted images of a butcher's shop, has also been associated with the tendency.
Bibliography
Further Reading
F. Spalding, The Kitchen Sink Painters (1990)
How to cite this entry:
"Kitchen Sink School" A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art by Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 12 October 2011
